ReadWriteWeb

dotjs is an OSX-only Chrome extension that lets you execute locally stored JavaScript files when you navigate to particular websites. You store a .js file in ~/.js and give it a name like google.com.js, and when you navigate to google.com, the script runs.

Think of it as a GreaseMonkey alternative for those who just want to create and run their own scripts without going through the trouble of publishing and updating them.

Innovations to improve SaaS platforms often come from people who use the technology every day. People need shortcuts or sometimes, ways to create a workaround for a change to the user interface.

Enter Greasemonkey scripts - those handy snippets of code that you can add to your Firefox or Chrome browser.

This is one of the beauties of Web-based services. The openness of Firefox and Chrome allows anyone to write code to improve the experience. That's exactly what the following two people did for Salesforce.com.

First released just over a year ago, Chrome has come to occupy 6% of the browser market worldwide, becoming the third most popular browser behind Internet Explorer and Firefox. As it continues to add features, it is poised to gain even more ground. Last December, the addition of browser extensions filled one of the browser's biggest shortcomings, and today the little browser that could has taken another step in the right direction by adding support for Greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey, previously only a Firefox add-on, lets you customize the way a website is displayed using small bits of Javascript, and we're excited to see it added to one of the faster, tidier browsers available.

Firefox users can now add and customize keyboard navigation to Facebook with just a few clicks using a new plug-in added to Userscripts.org this afternoon. Want the ability to jump to your friends' photos, your groups, or any other page on Facebook with a single keystroke? This simple script is really handy and is already helping me access parts of Facebook that have always been a few too many mouse-clicks away for them to show up regularly in my visits to the site.

Called simply Facebook Keyboard Navigation, the tool requires the Firefox plug-in Greasemonkey - a powerful browser customization tool you can learn to make even more advanced use of in 5 minutes.

Microsoft's ambitious new search engine Bing went live to the public this weekend and there are already two useful Greasemonkey scripts that Firefox users can add to make the service much more useful. Adding these overlays onto Bing will take you less than two minutes and you'll probably enjoy them a lot.

The first is much like our favorite Google script, which adds Twitter search results to the top of Google search results pages. Pennsylvania software developer, Billy DiStefano, published Twitter Search Results on Bing 30 minutes ago. Mattie Casper, a Principal Design Engineer at Citrix Systems, published a script called Bing Cleaner earlier this morning. Here's what Bing looks like with these scripts running, and short instructions on installing them.

Over the past year, all the major tech blogs have done round-up articles of great Greasemonkey scripts to use with Twitter (including us). What this says about Twitter's native functionality we aren't sure, but we know we've had upwards of 10 separate scripts installed and active at different times.

All that is going to end, at least for the next little while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It's the innocently named, Troy's Twitter Script (created by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.

Your browser doesn't have to be the boss of you - if you're a Firefox user there are a wold of different ways you can change how it displays your favorite websites. One of the most powerful is Greasemonkey, a plug-in that lets you install other little plug-ins ("scripts") that change the functionality or appearance of a wide variety of sites.

Greasemonkey is easy to use, fast and powerful. Most scripts are hosted and discussed at Userscripts.org, but that site can be a little overwhelming. In the past week, 375 scripts were added or updated. We looked through them all and picked out the best 5. Below we've also posted a screencast that will get you started harmlessly hacking your browser with Greasemonkey in under 5 minutes.

Remember that link I shared on Twitter yesterday? What if I told you I had a new tool that would help you find it again...and all it would cost was 1 year of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's time? That would be insane, would it not?

That's exactly what we saw, though, when we got a sneak peak today at Omidyar's new product Ginx. We wrote about Ginx when PE Hub first caught wind of its funding last month. We hoped it would incorporate all kinds of data-intensive recommendation mystery awesomeness. It might later, but so far it's quite simple and we describe below how you can reproduce most of its functionality without changing your essential workflow and using a new tool.

Greasemonkey is a powerful Firefox add-on that lets you change the appearance and functionality of almost any page on the web. Most people don't know how to write JavaScript, though, so we end up using the Greasemonkey scripts developed by other people who do. There are lots and lots of scripts that have been written and they are fun, useful and easy to run.

It's been downloaded 9 million times, but we believe many people still haven't heard of or taken the time to learn how to use Greasemonkey. So we recorded a 4-minute screencast showing you how to use the program and some things we like to do with it.